A Blind Eye: Book 1 in the Adam Kaminski Mystery Series

by Jane Gorman

  The nervous young woman working behind the desk hadn’t known what to do. She glanced at the armed guard standing near the main entrance, but his attention was on the street, not her desk. Seeing her discomfort, Łukasz had soldiered on, demanding to be allowed to review the documents from the secret police that were still housed there, claiming the right of the journalist to free access to information.

  When at first the young woman hesitated, and almost seemed like she was about to grant Łukasz the access he wanted, he switched tacks, raising his voice and spitting out insults about the archives, their management, and the people who used them.

  Finally realizing this was not something she could handle herself, the young woman picked up the phone and called her supervisor, the director of the archives himself. He appeared from a back room, a portly gentleman with a sour face. Too many hours peering at faint documents, Adam supposed.

  He took one look at Łukasz and promptly called over the guard. Which was the moment Adam had been waiting for.

  While the director and the guard were engaged in quieting Łukasz and trying to drag him off to a side room, Adam approached the young woman.

  Smiling apologetically, he said, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Polish. But I have a letter granting me access to these files. Is that okay?” Looking over at Łukasz, he added, “Should I come back another time?” He smiled again.

  The woman smiled gratefully back at him from behind the brightly polished, lemon-scented desk. “I am sorry, sir, this does not usually happen. I appreciate your understanding.” She glanced at the letter Adam held in his hands. “Let me see that, perhaps I can help you.”

  She read through the letter carefully, then looked back up at Adam. “This is from Minister Kapral. He says you are here on his authority and require free access to all of the records. This is very unusual.”

  Adam shrugged. “I understand if this isn’t something you can help me with. Perhaps we need to ask the director?” He gestured toward the portly man, now turning bright red in the face as Łukasz turned his venom onto the man’s innocent family.

  “No, no,” the young woman answered quickly. “I think it would be best not to bother him. This is clearly an important request. Of course we will honor it.”

  She smiled as she returned the letter to Adam, pressing a button underneath the desk. Adam heard a click as the oak door to his right unlocked. He thanked her as he headed through it, but she had turned her attention immediately back to the director and to the police, who had just arrived.

  Following signs for the public reading rooms, Adam took one flight of stairs up, stepping out into a narrow carpeted hallway that followed the circular curve of the building. On the left, windows looked down into the paved central courtyard, where a few benches waited for spring and warmer weather. Walking along the hall, Adam carefully pushed doors open, checking the rooms on his right.

  One was a large conference room, lined with artifacts and displays of Polish history — paintings, historic documents, mannequins in earlier versions of army uniforms. The air was stuffier in here and Adam suspected this was a ceremonial space, not often used.

  Other doors opened onto reading rooms, as Adam had supposed they would. Readers occupied small wooden desks tucked away under looming shelves. Each reader had an assigned desk, and as the materials he or she had requested became available, archivists would stack the materials, clearly labeled and numbered, on the shelves above the desks.

  Fewer than half the available desks were occupied and the rooms were painfully quiet; only the occasional turning of a page or stifled cough could be heard above the hum of the dehumidifiers. Tall, rectangular windows that looked out over the city allowed in only limited light, and dust motes danced across the rooms in the narrow beams that reached into the musty space. Adam was surprised to catch the scent of roses in one room, lingering traces of a woman’s perfume. The quiet young woman at the front desk, perhaps.

  He continued his way around the hall, heading toward the main storage building, when he spotted something he wasn’t expecting. A stroke of luck.

  A lone pay phone hung in a booth at the end of a short corridor jutting off of the main hallway. He stepped in and slid the doors closed behind him.

  “Pete, don’t say anything, just listen to me.” He spoke quickly before his partner could say anything to let the others in the squad room hear who was calling. It was risky bringing Pete into his problems like this, but he had no choice. He was only glad his credit card still worked and hadn’t been cut off already.

  “What the hell have you gotten into, partner?” Pete’s words were muffled, preventing others in the squad room from overhearing. “The captain’s getting calls about you left and right. You killed someone? What the hell?”

  “Cut it out, Pete, you know I didn’t kill anyone.” Adam smiled despite himself, glad to know that Pete still trusted him. “And you know what’s going on here. Whoever’s behind Basia’s death wants me out of the way. I still need to figure out who it is. Did you find anything else that will help?”

  “Not much,” Pete answered softly. “I’m still looking into the names you gave me, but they each seem to check out. I gave you all the background I had last time you called. Without going through the captain, there’s not much more I can find.”

  “Better not alert the captain you’re working on this. Not yet, anyway. He’ll have your skin.”

  “I think you should be more worried about your own skin, Kaminski. He said he wanted you to solve the murder — not get convicted for it.”

  “I know, partner, I’m working on it, believe me. I’m pretty sure I know who killed them. A man named Stefan Wilenek, former Polish secret police. Killer for hire. Nasty character.”

  Pete whistled. “Good work, Kaminski. Do you have enough proof to go to the Warsaw PD?”

  “Almost. Łukasz is writing up what he does know.”

  “Writing up? Like for the police, or for the paper?” Pete asked quickly.

  “For the paper. I know…” Adam cut off Pete’s objections. “But we still don’t have enough to stand up in a court of law, just our own testimony — and you know what my testimony is worth right now. His editor wouldn’t even publish what he wrote the first time. He’s working on revising it now, making sure it’s defensible against a libel suit. Meanwhile, I need to find out who hired Wilenek.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line as Pete thought about what Adam was saying. “What can I do to help?”

  “I need you to reach out to the rest of the team from the Philadelphia International Council. Did they all make it back safe?”

  “Yeah, they came back yesterday. The captain has already called each of them to let them know we’re still on the case to find out who killed Jared.”

  Adam felt himself relax. “I’m glad he did that. He’s a good man. I still need you to visit them, Pete. They’ll be hearing things about me now, and I need you to let them know I’m fine. That I’m on the case, too, and I won’t leave here until I solve it.”

  “Kaminski…” Pete started to say something, then cut himself off. After a pause, he continued, “You need to know this is hurting our case against Luis.”

  “Luis? What does he have to do with this?”

  “Nothing, partner, absolutely nothing. But it’s not just him. All your recent arrests are going to come under scrutiny.”

  Adam said nothing, thinking about the truth behind Pete’s words.

  “Luis is only locked up on our request that the judge wait until you’re back in Philly. And if you can’t testify…”

  “Or if my testimony isn’t worth crap…” Adam took a breath. “I get it. I know. I’ll figure this out.”

  “I know, partner. And I’ll talk to the people who were on your delegation. What about Jared White’s family? What can I say to them?”

  Adam shut his eyes, picturing Jared sitting on the train drinking coffee that was far too strong for him, talking about teaching, dreaming
of a future he would never see. “Tell them I will catch whoever did this. And tell them I will explain everything I know to them in person when I return.”

  “Uh-huh. And Julia? Anything I can tell her?”

  Adam realized with a start how all of this must look to his little sister. Her brother accused of murder, running from the police. He couldn’t even call her himself without implicating her in his alleged crime. He shook his head in the dark phone booth. “Take care of her, Pete. Just take care of her for me.”

  “Will do, partner,” Pete answered. “And you take care of yourself.”

  48

  The metal double doors leading to the glass enclosed bridge were closed, but not locked. Adam followed the bridge over the driveway through to the main storage facility behind the genteel public space of the archives.

  This building was simple and square. No windows exposed its contents to the sun’s potential damage. The air was dry and purified, dehumidifiers and air conditioners humming away actively in the background. No dust motes would be permitted to dance in the air here, Adam thought, seeing the fluorescent lights reflected sharply off the spotless tile floor, the gleaming metal of the modern shelving units stacked against each other throughout the large open space.

  The room filled half the floor of the large building, and down a long hallway to his right Adam saw another similar room. Silver and gray shelves, pushed up close together, back to front and front to back, created narrow aisles for archivists to squeeze through.

  Each individual shelf had its own metal wheel that, when turned, would slowly shift all the shelves in that unit, gradually exposing the desired contents. The room was clean but an earthy scent lingered, as if someone had tried but failed to wipe away the last traces of the outside world within this protected space.

  Adam walked through the long, narrow aisles, reading the small labels on the end of each shelving unit. These archives held over two thousand archival collections of records of central state institutions, social records, political records and records from the interwar period of Polish independence.

  On the labels that he could read with his limited Polish, Adam saw records of institutions including the Civil Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other ministries from the period between the wars.

  The records were kept in a variety of formats, holding for posterity not only written documents, but images and sounds as well. Copies of old slides filled a series of boxes while another held old tape recordings. Slide viewers and tape players had been placed strategically throughout the space, easy to hand for archivists responding to requests.

  He paused when he came across a series of labels noting the location of documents from the Polish Underground State from the period of World War II. These included documents of underground institutions and military units active during German and Soviet occupations of World War II. If he had had more time, he could have spent hours, days, discovering the secrets held within these historic files.

  He searched the shelves, working through years of history. Eventually, he found the more recent records, records of social institutions, labor organizations and political parties from within the last thirty years.

  He leaned in to the metal wheel at the end of the unit, and it slid smoothly around. The shelves silently shifted, opening up to Adam’s touch. As they moved, a whiff of the musty scent of the documents stored here floated out, then lost itself to the air purifiers above.

  Adam walked slowly along the shelf, running his hands across the file folders and books, breathing in the feeling of walking through history. He closed his eyes and could almost hear the din of the marches and parades, the shouts at labor union meetings, the anger at the student protests. The sounds of gunfire as the Polish people were attacked by their own government. The cries of joy as the truth was realized, that the communist state was no longer in control. The cheers, and cries, as Lech Wałęsa accepted the position of president of a free Poland.

  As Adam pulled down file after file, box after box, his shoulders sagged. He was searching for a needle in a haystack. A very large haystack. He had to find a way to narrow his search. He knew there was something in these records that implicated one of the men involved. It had to be something Basia Kaminski would have come across on her own.

  He narrowed his search to records of political activities in the Warsaw area, but even that would take him all night to work through. This wasn’t going to be easy. He had to trust that Łukasz would successfully talk his way out of his confrontation with the police. And he had to trust that Sylvia would keep his plans secret, even knowing the risk to her political career.

  With a deep breath and a glance at his watch, he got started.

  49

  Adam grimaced as he stretched his back, his neck cracking as he turned it from side to side. He put a hand on the shelf to his right and pushed himself up off the ground. Realizing that carrying the files he wanted back and forth to small tables on the far wall was taking too much time, Adam had resorted to squatting on the floor between the shelves as he read, pulling out one file, skimming through it, then replacing it and pulling out another.

  So far, he had found records showing Kapral’s involvement in a variety of political institutions since the regime fell, as well as documentation of Tomek Malak’s involvement in student protests throughout the 1980s. None of this was secret, however, and none of it a motive for murder.

  Looking around him, he realized with a start that beyond the narrow aisle he occupied, the rest of the room lay in darkness. Only weak red light from emergency exit signs lit the paths between the metal shelves.

  Łukasz’s distraction must have worked even better than they expected if the young woman at the front desk had forgotten to mention to anyone else that Adam was in here.

  He stretched again, his back screaming at him. He ran his tired eyes over the shelf one more time, then stepped out into the aisle to turn the wheel for the next set of shelves.

  He froze at a noise coming from the next room.

  The whirring, grinding sound grew louder as Adam moved toward it. He slid through the doorway to the next room and crept toward the sound, keeping his back against the steel shelves. He moved slowly, cautiously, closer.

  He was so close he could see the yellow light escaping from a room only a few aisles away when he recognized the sound. Such a familiar sound, he heard it at the precinct all the time. He just hadn’t placed it because it was so unexpected, in this place, at this time.

  He was listening to someone using a document shredder.

  The waist-high machine sat in a small room off the main floor. The door to the room was closed, but the wall facing the main records floor was lined with windows, and both light and sound escaped through these.

  Peering around the last shelf, Adam saw a man standing at the shredder. A pile of files lay on a table to his right, and he systematically pulled them apart into thin sheafs then fed them into the hungry machine. And unless the national archives had taken to hiring thugs to clear out their unneeded files, these were not documents that should be shredded.

  Stefan Wilenek focused on the work at hand, not looking around, not even reading the files he was destroying.

  “Shit,” Adam thought to himself. This was not good. He glanced around, but saw nothing but rows and rows of dark metal shelves. Looking back at Wilenek, he was not surprised to see the hilt of a knife peeking out from a sheath on his belt. Adam couldn’t attack him. That was a fight he would lose.

  Closing his eyes, Adam pictured the halls he had roamed through that evening. Tried to think of something he could use, some weapon or tool.

  He ran back up the silent aisles, through to the other room. First going to the files he had already reviewed, he set up the tools he needed there then moved on to the far door. Just beyond that door, he found a small metal cabinet built into the wall. Fingers crossed, Adam pulled it open and saw what he was hoping to see: light s
witches.

  Pushing all the switches to the “on” position, Adam ran again, almost sliding on the spotless tiles, back to the second step of his plan.

  Here, he turned on the tape player to its highest volume. The sound of voices, students debating the merits of an arcane law, filled the room as the bright overhead lights slowly kicked on, one after another.

  Running ahead of the sequence of lights, Adam returned to the small office where Wilenek had paused in his activity. Looking up, he could see the lights slowly moving toward him, as each connection in the sequence caught the power and kicked on with a flash. The voices were dim from this far away, loud enough to be heard but not, Adam hoped, to be understood. As if a group of people had just entered the archives and were slowly moving this way.

  Wilenek frowned and looked at his watch, then back up at the aisles where the lights were coming ever closer. With a snarl, he grabbed the sheaf of papers still in his hand and shoved it carelessly back into a cardboard file box.

  Moving quickly, he carried the box to a rolling cart, one of several pushed up against the wall, each storing file boxes of different sizes. Wilenek pushed his box to the back of a larger pile, arranging the boxes in front of it so it couldn’t be seen. Leaving the files somewhere he could find them easily when he returned, Adam assumed.

  With one more look out into the main room, Wilenek left the small office, killing the lights as he left, and slipped out through an unmarked metal door. Adam heard his footsteps ringing on the steps, fading away, as the last of the overhead lights kicked on.

  Adam stood there, exposed under the bright lights, listening for any sound of Wilenek’s return.

  Leaving the students’ voices playing, Adam moved into the room Wilenek had vacated. Going right for the box the other man had tried to hide, Adam pulled out the papers Wilenek had been so eager to destroy.